By Tunde Olusunle

When he flung Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, (SLS) out of the window of the Emir’s palace in Kano four years ago, Abdullahi Ganduje would have least imagined what is playing out today. Ganduje was the “Lord of the Manor” in Kano State, the all-powerful chief executive. Recall video clips of Ganduje allegedly stuffing wads and packs of crisp, mint-fresh dollar bills into the bottomless pocket of his babanriga ahead of the 2019 general elections. They were reportedly gifted to him by some contractor ally of the erstwhile Kano governor who was repaying a good turn. Graphic and unassailable as that short motion picture was, former President Muhammadu Buhari who rode into office on the camelback of now suspect integrity in 2015, volunteered a baffling defence for Ganduje. He swore Ganduje was most probably participating in a Kannywood movie, the way the film industry up North is described. Buhari who has never been known to operate a tablet, nay a notepad, suggested that advanced technology could actually simulate what we all saw in that short clip!

Ganduje was the prototype alagbara ma m’ero as we say in Yoruba. This interpretes as the “maximally muscular, minimally reasonable.” He fought a few other prominent Kano leaders during his heydays in Government House. Recall he carried his unabated squabbles with one of his predecessors, Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso to the State House, Aso Villa, during the early weeks of the Bola Tinubu government. Told on one occasion that Kwankwaso was in a particular section of Aso Rock same time as he was in the complex, a vexed Ganduje said Kwankwaso should consider himself fortunate. He said he, Ganduje would have slapped Kwankwaso if he sighted him in the Villa! That would have caused a scene in Nigeria’s seat of power. I’m now just imagining how Tinubu would be trying to restrain Ganduje, in the forecourt of the office of the President, while Vice President Kashim Shettima will be pulling at Kwankwaso’s agbada in a bid to manage the situation.

Ganduje reportedly considered Sanusi too independent-minded and outspoken for a natural ruler. Sanusi was governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, (CBN), before being appointed Emir in 2014. He had always had a radical streak about him which culminated in his suspension as CBN head in 2014 for blowing the whistle on the theft of $20 Billion in accruals from crude oil sales. As Emir he considered aspects of the religious and cultural practices of his emirate repugnant. He opposed the “ultra-conservative interpretation of Islam” in some parts of northern Nigeria, which discouraged girl-child education, family planning, even inoculation against potential healthcare afflictions. He had reservations about the style of Ganduje as governor and didn’t put a veil over his dislike for the return of Ganduje to Government House in 2019.

He believed Ganduje shouldn’t have made it back if the poll was fairly and transparently conducted. March 9, 2020, Ganduje upended Sanusi. He was accused of negatively impacting the sanctity, culture, tradition, religion and prestige of the Kano emirate, and disrespecting the governor’s office. He was also alleged to have disposed of property belonging to the state and the misappropriated of the proceeds. It was a case of digging several manholes for a prey in a bid to ensure he falls into one of the several traps. He was summarily banished to Nasarawa State for effect. Sanusi sought reprieve in the courts which ruled it was an overkill to fling him to a remote community faraway from his family and more accustomed home in Lagos. Within a few days, Nasir El Rufai, Sanusi’s longstanding friend who was governor of Kaduna State, personally enforced the evacuation of Sanusi from Awe local government area in Nasarawa State.

For whatever his contributions were to the emergence of Tinubu as president after the 2023 polls, Ganduje believed he would be compensated with a ministerial slot in the former’s regime. Like Nyesom Wike, David Umahi, Mohammed Badaru Abubakar, Atiku Bagudu, Simon Lalong, former governors of Rivers, Ebonyi, Jigawa, Kebbi and Plateau states, Ganduje dusted his curriculum vitae to pitch for a slot on Tinubu’s federal executive council. His five colleagues in the “2015 – 2019- 2023 class of governors” made the cut, not Ganduje. Tinubu spontaneously made him chairman of the All Progressives Congress, (APC], the vehicle which delivered him as president. Abdullahi Adamu his predecessor and former governor of Nasarawa State was, as has become standard practice in Nigeria’s notorious political rule book, schemed out and compelled to resign from office.

If Ganduje ever thought his chairmanship of the APC was going to be a walk in the park, he was thoroughly mistaken. Indeed, he’s grossed sufficient experience in his present office to know that there are sharp differences between wholesale insulation in Government House, and the inevitable overexposure of party leadership. Last April, a faction of the APC in Ganduje’s primary “Ganduje ward” in Dawakin Tofa local government area of his home state, Kano, suspended him from the party. Haladu Gwanjo, legal adviser of Ganduje’s ward led some party leaders to pronounce the suspension. They advocated the return of the national chairmanship of the APC to the north central zone, where Ganduje’s predecessor, Adamu, hails from. The young Turks canvassed due process in party administration, consistent with the “renewed hope” mantra of the APC. Ganduje made a hurried recourse to the law courts for momentary reprieve.

Thursday May 23, 2024, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi was reinstated as Emir of Kano by Ganduje’s successor in Kano State, Abba Yusuf. His cousin and successor, Aminu Ado-Bayero, was unceremoniously removed from office. The splinter emirates created by Ganduje in his bid to whittle down Sanusi’s authority as prime monarch in Kano, were similarly dissolved. The edifice which Ganduje built four years ago was apparently built of straw and spittle. Governor Abba Yusuf is a product of the Kwankwasiya political tendency in Kano politics, a creation of Rabiu Kwankwaso. Those who know a little about Nigerian politics will recall that Kwankwaso’s emergence in our politics, predates the fourth republic. He was an ardent student of the talakawa political orientation, pioneered by the venerable Kano-born leader, Aminu Kano. Kwankwaso was Deputy Speaker in the House of Representatives of the Ibrahim Babangida political experimentation of 1992 to 1993.

Whereas the Kwankwasiya movement had long been entrenched, it was not until the run-up to the 2023 elections that Kwankwaso adopted a new platform, the Nigeria National People’s Party, (NNPP), on which he is espousing the populist philosophy of the Kwankwasiya brigade. Abba Yusuf rode to office on the back of this invention. It was the same way Chukwuemeka Odimegwu Ojukwu the famous Biafran war lord, established the All Progressives Grand Alliance, (APGA) in Anambra State. The party has remained a force in the politics of the state and indeed the south east. It has produced three Anambra governors in succession, notably Peter Obi, Willie Obiano and the incumbent Chukwuma Soludo.

Abba Yusuf has made no pretences about his disdain for Ganduje and everything he represents. Much as some of Yusuf’s early actions in office were generally perceived as wasteful, he nonetheless brought down as many edifices in Kano as bore the imprimatur of Ganduje. The “Kano golden jubilee roundabout” built to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the creation of Kano State and structures built inside the filin sukuwa, (Kano race course), were hewn on Yusuf’s orders. The hajj camp which was reportedly bastardised by Ganduje who allegedly parcelled parts of it to his friends and associates was equally felled. There were suggestions that the value of the demolitions carried out by Yusuf could be in excess of N200Billion. Such is the anti-Ganduje sentiment in contemporary Kano State.

The way and manner the legacies of Abdullahi Ganduje are unravelling in Kano State should serve as a lesson to the shortsighted, incapable of seeing beyond the bridges of their nose. History is replete with the deconstruction of many leaders after their rulership and indeed keeps repeating itself in our sociopolitical experience. Those who are not circumspect, however, are too distracted by the allure and bliss of their immediate office, to think. They continue to drift, blunder and flounder, unmindful that time is their ultimate nemesis. Ganduje is just one year out of office, yet many of the decisions he made while in power for eight years are being unmade and thrown at his face like rotten tomatoes.

Until I joined him on the table he was seated at a wedding reception we both attended in Lagos a few weeks back, Rotimi Amaechi, governor of the oil-affluent Rivers State for eight years and Transportation Minister for another eight years was a lonely man. It turned out we flew back to Abuja on the same flight same evening after the event and sat not too far from each other. He opened the overhead locker atop his seat to bring out his luggage himself. Is anyone following the Yahaya Bello saga? He mindlessly trampled upon the hapless heads of his constituents in Kogi State for eight unbroken years? He left office last January and life has not been the same again. He has been declared wanted by at least one anti-graft agency. He will be arraigned in the rectangular, wood-panelled cubicle of the courtroom in a fortnight. A lesson for all.

Tunde Olusunle, PhD, is a Fellow of the Association of Nigerian Authors, (FANA)

BY
PROF. MIKE A. A. OZEKHOME, SAN, CON , OFR, FCIArb, LL.M, Ph.D, LL.D, D.Litt, D.SC, DA, DHL

INTRODUCTION
When on October 1, 1960, Nigeria gained her independence from British colonial tutelage, the Union Jack was lowered and replaced with Nigeria’s Green White Green Flag. A new National anthem, “Nigeria, we hail thee”, was introduced. The anthem with three stanza was written by a Briton, Frances Berda, whilst Lilian Jean Williams composed the lyrics. This anthem was to last till 1978 when the then Head of State, General Olusegun Obasanjo, GCFR, caused it to be replaced with a new National anthem titled “Arise, O Compatriots”. Only 29th May, 2024, the President, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, assented to a bill, rather rapidly passed by the National Assembly (NASS), bringing back the old “Nigeria, we hail thee” anthem which has evoked so much passion and nostalgia.

A wide spectrum of the society has criticised the President and the National Assembly for pursuing with such vigor, the replacement of the existing National anthem with the old one. Their argument is simply that, whether old or new, none of the National anthems has brough food to the tables of any Nigerian or constructed our dilapidated roads; or stabilised the Naira which continues to dance like the Esan Egbabonalimin Acrobat, to music only it can understand. They argue that a mere change of the National anthem has not brought about good healthcare service; quality education to our teeming youths; nor security and peace to a country ravaged and rampaged by Boko Haram, insurgency, armed banditry, kidnapping, hunger, thirst, melancholy, hopelessness and haplessness of the average Nigerian man and woman.

The antagonists argue that the rate of inflation in Nigeria today which stands at an incredible 33.20% in March, 2024, is economically and socially strangulating as against United States’ 3.36%; the United Kingdom’s 2.30%; China’s 0.30%; Germany’s 2.40%; France’s 2.40% and EU’s 2.60% inflation rate. They argue that singling out the issue of National anthem from a myriad of more serious multifaceted challenges plaguing Nigeria is a mere narcissistic distraction employed by a government that appears to have no answers to Nigeria’s burning problems. Such Nigerians cannot understand why they should be concerned about the National anthem when rice sells for over N90,000 per bag and when prices of soup condiments like atarodo, tatashe, onions, palm oil, tubers of yam and our main staple food, garri, not to talk of bread, have since spiraled out of the reach of the average Nigerian.

While I share these strong sentiments, many of them well-placed, I however disagree that changing to the old National anthem was not a step well taken. I give kudos to President Tinubu and the National Assembly for passing the bill into law. For historical purposes, what the President and the National Assembly just did on 29th May, 2024, was actually my idea 10 years ago, when on the floor of the 2014 National Confab which was headed by the now late Justice Idris Legbo Kutigi (JSC) Rtd, with his deputy as Prof Bolaji Akinyemi, and the Secretary as Dr. Mrs Valerie Azinge, SAN. Just like Nostradamus, the man who saw into the future, I had moved a motion on Wednesday, 2nd July, 2014, calling for the replacement of “Arise, O Compatriots” with “Nigeria, we hail thee”. Some of the reasons I gave, which I repeated on 27th May, 2024, at the public hearing organized by the Senate during my contribution to the debate, is that the old National anthem possesses more nationalistic fervor, more patriotic gravitas and more inclusive and aggregative tendencies for a country yearning for nationhood than the bland and colourless “Arise, O Compatriots” which did not and could not energise Nigerians to see themselves as one people under one God.

When I moved the said motion at the 2014 Confab, it was hotly debated and unanimously and consensually carried by the 492 delegates to the National Confab that presented Nigerians from all strata of the society – Federal Government; States; LGAs; Elderstatesmen and women; youth; students; civil societies; Labour; Trade Unions; traditional rulers; professionals; technocrats; private and public sectors; the military; civilians; the Executive; the Legislature; the Judiciary; the disabled; the civil service; the academia; the foreign service; members of the diplomatic corps; the Police; the market men and women and more.

Spontaneously, the entire venue at the National Judicial Institute, Abuja, erupted when all the delegates stood up and made a clear rendition of the said old National anthem of “Nigeria, we hail thee”. There was something unusual about the unconstrained reaction; something simply unspeakable. It was like the scene of a football field featuring Nigeria and another country where all Nigerians buy into our victory irrespective of tribe, language, religion or class. This was the type of reaction which the late Dr. K.O. Mbadiwe would describe as leading to “national resurgimiento”. It was one of the very few items on which Nigerians built a consensus. This is what the newly brought back National anthem of Nigeria, we hail thee epitomizes. I had gone ahead in 2017 to author a 406 paged book titled, “Nigeria we hail thee”, a book that discussed in its entirety, the 2014 Confab from its genesis to its revelation. At pages 268-271 of the book, I had specifically discussed the need to revert to the “Nigeria, we hail thee” National anthem. I had even suggested that Nigeria’s name be changed to “Airegin”, a right-to-left pronunciation and spelling of Nigeria. I had also proposed that the national flag be changed to the original design that had the same green-white-green colours, but with a rising sun that shoots rays of light to all corners of Nigeria. While the latter two suggestions did not sail through, that of the National anthem did. I therefore believe that the 2014 National Confab should be given full recognition and kudos for at least having one of its over 600 recommendations adopted, even if a whooping 10 years later. Nothing good is ever too late. This reintroduced anthem will serve as a soothing balm to massage our bruised and fractured country still yearning for nationhood. Let us see and hear the lyrics to be able to capture this passion:
Nigeria, we hail thee,
Our own dear native land,
Though tribe and tongue may differ,
In brotherhood, we stand,
Nigerians all, and proud to serve
Our sovereign Motherland.

Our flag shall be a symbol
That truth and justice reign,
In peace or battle honour’d,
And this we count as gain,
To hand on to our children
A banner without stain.

O God of all creation,
Grant this our one request,
Help us to build a nation
Where no man is oppressed,
And so with peace and plenty
Nigeria may be blessed.

The anthem from the lyrics and composition recognizes that Nigeria

By Mr. Elaye Youdeowei

The Agunloye Mambilla trial is of public interest because it gives an insight to the inner workings of government and a reflection of poor governance. It is laden with melodrama and manoeuvres of which the public needs much information and deeper understanding.

The Federal Government of Nigeria devised a criminalisation strategy to free itself from liabilities at the arbitration panel in France where it pleaded that “all the claims on the Mambilla project by Messrs Sunrise were illegal and fraudulently procured”, including the Sunrise’s Build, Operate and Transfer (BOT) contract of 2003, its procurement contract of 2012 and all Agreements signed with FGN in 2012 and 2020 because Ministers and government officials were corrupt and did not obey the sitting Nigerian Presidents. FGN then proceeded to criminalise all actions of officials on the Mambilla project except those under the Buhari’s APC Government whose actions actually led to the arbitration in France.
FGN has striven hard to make a ‘P&ID’ out of the Mambilla, but this is not sticking because Sunrise showed early preparedness for work by partnering with leading hydroelectric-dam construction companies in China and secured adequate funds; and is still ready to commence work on the Mambilla project. Also, the then President Obasanjo and his Ministers had official transactions for four years with Sunrise’s partners after the BOT contract was awarded in 2003. Sunrise’s readiness to execute the Mambilla project is also evident from the involvement of Chinese President Xi who told President Buhari to “formally engage or disengage Sunrise to access the Chinese funds which Sunrise secured for the Mambilla project”. FGN also attempted to use the ‘P&ID treatment’ on the Mambilla case, but civil rights lawyers rose against the criminalisation processes and procedures.
In respect of the criminalisation strategy, the issues that Agunloye must combat are the criminal charges for “awarding a $6 billion BOT contract without cash backing, disobeying oral directives of the President, forging his own letter and receiving a bribe of N3.6 million 16 years after.” He will also combat the emergent bias, prejudice, and prejudgment on the part of the trial judge and, in general, a lifetime struggle for justice and his civil rights.
The update at the courts so far is that Agunloye’s suit filed in June 2023 to stop EFCC from harassing him was not heard in time and was finally dismissed after EFCC had indeed harassed and arraigned him before the trial judge, Justice Onwuegbuzie, who later dismissed the amicus curiae intervention sought by Agunloye to enable “friends of the court” to appear before the court. Agunloye’s rights violation suit that the EFCC declared him wanted without judicial intervention and his libel suit against EFCC have been adjourned until 24 June 2024 and 16 October 2024 respectively. On 15 May 2024, Justice Onwuegbuzie dismissed the preliminary objection raised by Agunloye in a prejudiced, prejudged ruling and set 30 May 2024 for the commencement of the trial.

The thick bias of the trial judge, Justice Jude Onwuegbuzie, became exposed in the court on 15 May 2024 during which he appeared easily irritable and impatient. He scolded the defence lawyers for wasting his time with the motion on Amicus Curiae “to invite members of the public to my court” and then again on “the preliminary objection thing” and now “they are asking for time to enable the defendant to attend UCH (University College Hospital, Ibadan) for medical attention,” adding rather coldly: “He can attend UCH today and the court tomorrow.”

In his ruling of 15 May 2024, the Judge, revealed an uncanny bias by literally declaring Agunloye guilty of the allegations charged even before the commencement of the trial. This is akin to what Professor Glanville Williams, a world-renowned scholar of criminal law, described with “Let’s give him a fair hearing so that we may hang him” of an extreme bias of a judge that has made up his mind to convict an accused person. The prejudicial and pre-judgmental finding of guilt against Agunloye, when the trial has not begun or any evidence led, pointedly shows the unlikelihood of fair trial and manifest bias by Justice Onwuegbuzie.
After months of the Mambilla trial in Abuja, the following facts are staring at us in the face:

a.   Chief Obasanjo’s grandstanding is all about covering up his infractions in the power sector during his eight-year tenure as President.

b.   The defence of FGN in the Arbitration in France is “Deny, Criminalise, and Escape.”

c.    The issues that led to the arbitration in France were under the Buhari’s APC Administration and Agunloye is not part of the international arbitration in any form.

d.   Agunloye is being used as scapegoat-sacrifice in the hope that his conviction by a Nigerian court would absolve the FGN of its conduct under Buhari’s APC Administration.

e.   EFCC, without a Fiat from the Attorney General and without compliance with its Establishment Act, arraigned Agunloye before a court angling for a conviction at all costs.

f.   The bias of the trial judge, Justice Jude Onwuegbuzie, is palpable.

In all of these, Agunloye has consistently insisted that he did not commit any crime, and that Nigeria’s Presidents Obasanjo, Yar’Adua, Jonathan, Buhari, and Tinubu know about his innocence and that FGN is prosecuting him to corroborate its pleas at the arbitration in France. This is why people are saying that FGN wants to convict Agunloye to free itself from liabilities in the Arbitration even though FGN knows that the issues that led to the international arbitration were caused under Buhari’s APC Government and not by Agunloye.

The Mambilla case is of public interest and a “political case” even though FGN calls it a “criminal case.” Eminent local and foreign civil rights icons and activists became frantic when the bias of Justice Jude Onwuegbuzie was revealed in his own ruling prompting the establishment of a Worldwide Crusade against the re-enactment in Nigeria of what Glanville Williams denounced as “Let’s give him a fair hearing so that we may hang him”.

Mr. Elaye Youdeowe

UK Truth and Justice Group